The rented house on the hill was glowing from all of its windows. Lila could see it from miles away after she turned to follow the line of the upstate highway—a few bright spots in a huge wall of dusk. She landed short, in the woods, and took off her armour and boots the old-fashioned way, leaving herself naked except for a vest and underwear. The air was cold and damp against her skin. It felt refreshing and she stood and bathed in it for a minute or two until the last of the heat had ebbed from her. She lifted her face to the sky, listening to the woodland sounds, the cicadas, the breeze. She would have given a lot to be able to sit there and do nothing but enjoy the night, but there wasn't time for that.
Instead she sat down on a rock and picked up the shoulderguards of her bike leathers and looked at them with machine eyes. In the days of her cyborg youth these had been her issued clothing, but lately she had come to spontaneously create and absorb the armour and even cloth items. Her surface could be remade in any material, her insides too. She knew that on the inside, although she felt as human as she ever had, there was little that resembled human biology now. She looked and sounded like the real thing, but it was like the faeries' glamour and the demons' generosity—an illusion. But she hadn't examined this process in action before. Probably she would never have, since it made her extremely uneasy to the point where she would rather do almost anything than continue.
And then Lane had turned up. A clone. A life-size, real, updated to the last living second clone. One of potentially many. But at least one that was an exact copy of the original at some point. Instantly Lila had wondered how Lane had done it and instantly her answer had come—in the same way that Lila made her armour.
Until this moment she hadn't considered removing her self-made armour the same way she'd take off ordinary clothes. Sure, she'd once stripped off some of her synthesised skin to make a point, but that was strictly to make the most of the moment. It hadn't occurred to her that she could remove pieces as a matter of habit, and then, after that thought did cross her mind, she felt like it would be removing a part of herself and she was repulsed and a little frightened. Now she sat and held the pieces and they felt and acted exactly like the human-made artefacts she had copied so faithfully. In fact, they were comically accurate when seen from a machine angle.
Lila had copied leather, Kevlar, and metal, picking the engineering plans out of the machine whisper as easily as breathing. She could have done what the machine had done to her and simply given the appearance of those materials whilst creating something entirely other beneath the surface, something much more effective, but she didn't feel ready for that.
More to the point, having removed the items, she could hold them now and in no way did they feel like holding her own severed arms. They felt quite detached, because they were, in every way except one, just leather biker armour. The difference existed in the extra information they contained at the quantum level, one step up from raw energy. This code was like a watermark. Their pattern was her pattern, a holographic exactitude of sameness at a fundamental plane. Lane and Bentley's choice of form was more than a political statement, it was a kind of ironic art. The evolved cyborgs were truly, exceptionally plastic. Having thought of that Lila still didn't get what was so great about being Boring or Evil Barbie without the hair or the little shoes.
She did wonder where all the material came from. Where did the sheer mass come from out of which these things appeared? She didn't feel smaller now. In fact, weight for weight, she was the same. So when she absorbed it, where did it go? Was she creating her own miniature inequality that would tear space and time apart when she left the two sides of the equation unfulfilled? Is that what the elves had done in their own way? Did it start like this?
She put one of her gauntlets back on and this time watched closely as her body assimilated it. Sure enough, the weight of the gauntlet vanished as it vanished into her skin and left her, freckles and fingernails, exactly the same as a moment before. The machine part of her mind revealed with impeccable observation that the gauntlet was simply unmade into pure energy again. But that begged another and even more curious question: Where did the energy come from, and where did it go to? The gauntlet itself contained enough pure energy to run Otopia for a week, if converted into electricity, say, but she didn't feel a thing as these processes—their speed and nature incomprehensibly rapid and accurate to her human mind—flowed effortlessly to the guidance of her will alone. She realised she could make anything.
Anything.
Surely there must be some price? So where was her debt?
A similarity struck her then. Lane could make anything, including copies of herself. She could make any object and fill it up with her own awareness. What then was Tatterdemalion? Did it make sense to think of the faeries the same way, as aspects of an awareness that existed in forms that weren't tied to living things, or places, or times?
She didn't know the answers, guessed it wasn't so simple, and picked up the rest of the armour from the ground where it had become cool and damp with condensation. She was about to carry it up to the house when she hesitated and put it down again. What happened if she left it there?
This time a spooked feeling did run up her arms and down her back. Magic operated to energy signatures; she knew it was a big mistake to leave it where it could fall into unkind hands. She bent and picked it up again and absorbed the pieces by putting them on and unmaking them. By this time she had started to shiver—her body was programmed to react exactly like a human one—but she saw no point in feeling extra pain so she toughened the soles of her feet as she made her way up to the house and heated herself. It was genuinely strange to be without the faery dress, but she didn't regret abandoning it. The relief was much greater. She hadn't known until now that half her constant discomfort was the unwanted presence of Tatterdemalion and its unfathomable motives. Without Tatters she felt vulnerable, especially when she realised how much she'd relied on the faery to do her magical defending. She was like a snail without a shell, but she didn't feel abused or overlooked or spied upon anymore and that was better.
Quietly she crossed the open expanse of the driveway and padded up the steps to the porch. The lights were all on inside, glowing low on standby. The door opened to her hand silently and she closed it behind her, listening. She could hear rock music playing very quietly. In the living area she looked past the central fire where logs were slumping down into embers and saw Zal's blond head resting on the back of the sofa. A reproachful smell of cold Chinese food came from the kitchen.
She walked around the cosy scene and saw that the screen was on showing a live Hyper Metal Angels concert from the other side of Otopia. It was in Marentz, she realised, as her AI matched city shots and ran TV guides. The show's gaudy colours shone on Zal, slouched in the corner in an uncomfortable position, eyes slitted as he watched. Sassy was lying full length on the rest of the sofa, her head resting awkwardly against Zal's shoulder where she'd fallen asleep.
Zal moved his eyes to look at Lila as she came into view although he showed no surprise. She felt a feathery touch and a slight sparkle and the room dimmed as he reached up to embrace her with his aetheric body. He glanced pointedly at the sleeping girl to indicate why he wasn't leaping up and slowly extricated himself. He pulled one of the back cushions down to act as a pillow for her and straightened up gently as if he'd been lying there for a long time. Lila started to apologise, but he put his fingers against her lips and pulled her into his arms.
Lila pulled back just enough to look up into his face. In the penumbral gloom of his andalune body it looked like it was made of rock. Then she smelled lime spritzers and recognised the smell of wild aether that gathered in sudden rushes around the blooming potentials of any major aetheric lightning bolt preparing to ground itself and discharge—suddenly her nose was full of citrus.
Zal's eyes narrowed. “I do so hate it when that gives me away.”
“Me too,” Lila said, meaning that she had been in the same state, would have done anything just then to fall into bed with him, and couldn't care less about the game and its consequences one way or another. “But I missed it when it wasn't here. Where did it go?”
“I wondered about that,” he said. “I had a headache maybe?”
They hesitated even longer, enjoying the feeling of each other's bodies so close, the anticipation of the night, the fact that they weren't accompanied by anyone—at least nobody awake. Lila was especially happy. Everything was simpler around Zal.
Lila glanced down at the sleeping girl. Her breath was long and even, and she didn't stir. Zal's fingers against her jaw gently turned her head back to face him.
“Will you run away?” His whisper was soft but full of wolf promises.
She moved her lips closer to his, so that as she spoke they touched. “I never run.”
They sprang together with mutual hunger. She was stripping off his clothes, feeling stitches rip. His hands cupped her buttocks, lifting her, and she felt his moment of surprise as he succeeded easily in getting her off the floor. She wrapped her legs around his hips as she pulled his shirt free. His mouth was hot on her neck as she flung the remains to the floor. Across his back the demon flare was burning deep orange and red, the shape of the wings looking like a clear window into his body—an interior of living flame. It shone its flickering, weaving light on her fingers as she raked her nails along the powerful muscles, feeling the delicious resistance of smooth skin over the hard contours of flesh and bone.
He growled in appreciation and opened his mouth wide to bite hard into her shoulder, easing a need to use his teeth where it would do the least harm, and she thrust a hand into his thick hair, pulling his head closer. The heavy fall of his hair slid over her forearms and tickled her. She kissed along the thick upper ridge line of his long exposed ear, feeling the gradual thinning with her tongue as she moved along to the tip and took the cool point in her mouth. She nipped it and he broke his hold to gasp in a deep breath.
On the sofa the girl stirred and muttered.
Zal carried Lila into the bedroom, ducking so that both their heads would fit under the lintel. He used the same movement with a well-timed burst of energy to fling her down on the bed and kicked the door shut behind them. Once it was closed, the darkness was nearly absolute. His demon wings lit the room as if it was on fire. Yellow-orange light bled out across his skin as he undid his belt and kicked off his trousers. He paused, a half-grin on his face, one knee on the bed, and she wondered what he was doing when she felt his fingertips brushing her face. She could see perfectly well that it wasn't his actual hands but nonetheless it was there and sure, very light but as tangible as real flesh. It was his andalune body, so strong in the dark that he was able to make it solid, she realised. She looked down and saw her own tanned skin lit by his golden light. Uncast shadows moved across her where his touch slid down her collarbones and across her breasts.
She saw the same dark patterns move across his body—forming shapes that looked like hands for brief moments before they dissolved into cloudlike, nebulous forms and remade themselves again. They crisscrossed the iron-shirt ridged muscle of his torso and surrounded the base of his erection, moving languidly there. At the same moment, she felt a touch much more like a tongue than fingers trail across the inside of each thigh. Her attention was all on Zal's face, however. She looked at him more closely than she had looked at anything in her life. In his expression she read beneath the desire and passion nakedly displayed and saw his abiding nature. Zal danced at the edges of all things, lightly. Beneath his apparent commitment to nothing was a complete commitment to his own nature. And there was love in his gaze, playfulness and deadly serious intent in equal measure as he came forward, prowling over the top of her, his breath hot. She lay completely relaxed and open beneath him. She had never wanted anything more than she wanted him. His presence was like medicine to her battered spirit. She reached up and drew him down. His hair fell around their faces like a veil, closing them off from everything.
“It's been too long,” he said, not pausing as he entered her.
The feeling was so purely ecstatic she lost her mind for a moment, and when she came round she found herself saying, “Never leave me.”
His reply was in elvish and muffled against her neck so that she didn't hear the actual words, but it didn't matter.
They made love for a long time, at first fiercely and later lazily until the light in Zal receded beneath his skin and Lila couldn't keep her eyes open any longer. They slept until dawn.
When she awoke, the first thing Lila saw was the strange girl, standing in the open doorway eating a popsicle. The headscarf was back in place, oddly adult and formal on her young head—reluctantly tamed dreadlocks peeked from its skirt at her shoulders. The pearly sheen on her black skin was distinctive, outlining her in a peculiar whiteness at shoulder and hands where the daylight streaming through the kitchen windows crossed the hall and caught her.
Sassy removed her popsicle with a smacking noise. “You're in trouble.” She said this with certain grimness and licked her lips in an interested kind of way. Her gaze was flat and direct. Lila noticed for the first time that her clothing was ragged and unwashed and too small for her.
“Dial the news desk,” Lila said, closing one eye. Zal's legs were over hers and he was heavy and warm. She didn't want to move.
The girl replaced the popsicle for a minute and continued to stare thoughtfully. Then she removed it to say, “I wish I could see into the spirit world, but I can't.”
“I wish I could stay in my own room without being woken up by staring people,” Lila said. She noted the angle of the light and considered the time and day. “Aren't you supposed to be in school?”
The girl rolled her eyes as if this was the most stupid question ever asked of a being. Lila closed hers in response.
“You know they're not human, right?”
This question made Lila open her eyes again, and now she was properly awake and resenting every instant of it. “Oh?”
“The dead. Undead. Whatever you want to call them.” Sassy leaned on the doorframe at an exaggerated angle of insouciance. “But you probably want to think they are.” She shifted her weight, unable to keep her attitude stable.
“Can this possibly wait until you go out and I get up and get dressed?” Lila asked hopefully.
“Most people don't want to know,” the girl said with a shrug. “I guess you're the same.”
“She's not the same,” Zal's voice rose from behind Lila's head, hoarse but distinct.
Sassy rolled her eyes again, suddenly choosing this moment to feel embarrassment, and pushed off from the doorframe and away. Lila heard the sounds of cupboards being opened and the rustle of a bag. She forgot it for a while, kissing Zal, then as they were lying with their heads close he said, “I don't know all her story but she's from one of those downtown slums that have become no-go areas for the average human.”
“I don't find any missing person report,” Lila said. “But she's under age. Interesting demographic down there. No wonder she wanted to leave.”
The place he mentioned was Cedars, a parkland development of social housing that had once been the height of the city's civic pride, but that was back in Lila's heyday. Now it was like the Diner, a gathering hotspot for outsiders and anyone who wanted to retreat to gangland safety from the twitchy arm of the law. Bay City's murder capital, it was covered in the red dots of assaults and the black dots of deceased victims on the cop map. They suspected at least one Hunter killer to live in the dens there, but nobody short of a swat team was going to go find out, and there were no swat teams not occupied elsewhere in the country with the combination of Returners and the Hunter's other rogue children. Cedars was one of the items high on the list of triple exclamation-point alert notes that the police commander had wanted to talk to her about. With the AI dealing with everything it could, the only items left in her Inbox were those that couldn't be dealt with except through her personal intervention and this wasn't one of those. If Sassy was on the run from Cedars, Lila wasn't about to rush to hand her over to the police or the gangs. It took a special kind of guts and guile to get out of a place like that, and maybe a special kind of reason.
“I hate that she always knows what's on my mind.”
Zal didn't budge and kept his eyes closed. “I don't. Just wish I knew what was bothering her.”
Lila sat up and rubbed sleep out of her face. “How many elves you know of here?”
“None,” he said. “Teazle mentioned they'd caught a few in Demonia, but I haven't seen him since you have. Then again, I'm going on what you told me from memory and I haven't been anywhere without you so it's not worth asking.”
She unpicked the sense of his statement after a minute. “There are some on the immigration and city tracking nets, thirteen to be exact, including Arie. Plus the mad one in the Agency basement. And you.”
He stretched and resettled himself, waking up like she was, slowly and with reluctance. “Just cut to the chase; I don't need to verify your reasoning and the longer you take, the more sure I get that the news is bad.”
“Alfheim's gone dark,” she said, aware that the sounds of teenage exploration in the kitchen had stopped. “Sarasilien says that only an elf would be able to go back and find out what's happening, although he's lying-by-omission-his-ass-off and knows perfectly well what's going down if you ask me, and he's playing for time.”
Zal opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling for a few moments. “I thought you were assigned to undead duty.” His tone was disapproving and she felt the bite of his disappointment. He thought she'd enough for the humans, and with the Diner incident no doubt more than enough.
“Triage,” Lila said. “Sarasilien and his droid think this is global-catastrophe duty, and that outweighs undead issues since they aren't world threatening. The worst part about it is, I kinda agree, while at the same time the desire to smash his face in with the nearest blunt object is almost overwhelming. And I feel like I'm towing you for the ride. And then he springs this and says he wants you to go. And I just got you back. I totally fucking hate the idea. I hate it all. But if the only way it'll go away and leave us in peace is to deal with it, then I'm going to deal.”
She was able to place Sassy just around the corner from the open door quite easily. On his back beside her, Zal continued his stare at the ceiling. “Zal?”
“Why me?”
“Good question, I—”
“No, I mean, why doesn't he go? Why does he ask for me?”
“Because you're demon in part and he thinks that will make you immune to whatever it is that he apparently doesn't know anything about.”
“So he's probably right about that.”
“I guess there's a good chance.” Lila hesitated; the girl was a wild card in her mind, allegiances unknown.
“You could come with me.”
“I don't trust him,” she said, almost at the same moment so they spoke over each other. She was the one to continue. “If I go with you, then there won't be any contact with him here, and I wouldn't be here to keep Xavi under wraps. He could do anything.”
“There is the whole of the Otopian Agency—”
“Not capable of dealing. Malachi is their only powerful aetheric operative still on active duty and I wouldn't give him ten seconds against Sar. Besides which, he has his own problems and crossing Sar wouldn't be on his list. Plus I pissed him off yesterday and we aren't talking. Bentley's good and the other cyborgs are fine, but they're all human mechanoid, not an ounce of aether between them. And I don't like the idea of leaving Xavi off radar either, even if she is doing a faultless line in helpful repentance. She's got to be nearly as old as Sar is, and executing her revenger's tragedy took several hundred lifetimes' worth of hard intent. Giving it up on the turn of one little psychological screw doesn't strike me as all that plausible.”
“So, what were you going to do?” Zal was amused. He rolled onto his side and propped his head on one hand, putting the other one on her knee.
“I'm going to see Ilya. I was going to anyway, but Malachi said something about him having changed. Plus, now that we're not talking I don't know how I'm going to see him.”
“Ah, so I go to Alfheim and single-handedly save it, and you go across the threshold of the spirit world and figure out the dead problem and then we're home free?”
She frowned and aimed a play punch at his arm. “Why d'you put it like that? Makes it sound like I'm an idiot.”
“I know the way your mind works, is all,” he said, making his index and middle fingers work out a few tango steps on the inside of her knee. “Mine used to work like that.”
“You're saying it doesn't now?”
“Now it doesn't work at all, which is a merciful release.”
Lila began to reply but then a fresh awareness of Sassy sneaking around outside the door broke in on her again and she hesitated. Part of her wanted to damn the situation and to hell with any consequences; she was sick and tired of sharing every moment with Zal with some other person as well, no matter how passively. Another part of her said that they had no idea what Sassy's agenda was, if she had one, and it would be wiser to keep her mouth shut. And then, having turned this way, her thoughts trotted down the path that suggested Sassy might have run here lost and lonely and was in need of help herself. She felt some empathy, but then again, she felt like screaming too.
Zal grinned and picked his fingers up, tracing circles around on the inside of her knee like a lazy ice dancer. “But…” His white teeth shone clearly against the dark of his skin, taken down many shades by both the low light and his aetherial body's emergence.
“But…” she said and let it hang there. “If I don't do this, who will? I'm the only cyborg with a hotline to the dead.”
Zal's hand slid all the way up her leg. Lila rolled her eyes vividly in the direction of the door. He grabbed hold of the sheet and cover and pulled them up over both their heads. “We can hide in here.” He moved in close, warm and delicious, and kissed her. She slid next to him until they were pressed against each other as closely as they could be. The strength of his aetheric body around her made her nerves tingle with a faint, just detectable resonance that spread comfort and pleasure through every part of her. She bathed in him and felt him hum with delight. She traced his face and the long lines and narrow, ragged edge of his ears.
“Contrary to popular belief, the ears are not the best erotic organ on an elf,” he murmured.
“Really?” she altered the structure of her palms and fingertips and began to emit ultrasound, tuning the frequencies by his reactions. She travelled over pressure points and along energy channels. When, a moment later, she touched the two points of his ears with an exact vibration and depth, he was wordless.
It was an old technique, one she learned by accident when she'd been forced into performing emergency surgery on Dar and accidentally triggered an energetic total body response in him that had swept both of them into an intimate melding that was as much pleasure as surprise. There was also the enormous gratification of using sound to play Zal, rock star, elf, and demon, like a musical instrument.
Their relationship had been stupidly brief but the honeymoon long enough to experiment with sonics a great deal and she knew what she was doing now. She understood exactly why Zal had got such an enormous kick out of rock music—it hit him on a mental, emotional, aetheric, and physical level. By tuning her own body and creating points of transmission, she could create ecstasy in him. It delighted her, more than any other toy she'd ever known, and it made her shy and careful with him because it was so powerful and he was putty in her hands when she used it.
When she woke up for the second time, her mind snapped to attention. She looked around and found that Zal was already gone, the bedsheets tangled in his wake and the sun shining in at a late-morning slant through a crack in the shutters. The door was closed and beyond it she heard his voice and the girl's talking in the kitchen. Music radio played in the background.
Lila stretched her legs and toes out. The novelty of this, the novelty of making love with a full body again, was not lost for a second, and she wanted to stretch them out, aware that her chances of feeling so good again soon were very short. Surely, surely now she ought to glory in her abilities, but in spite of all the positives in the changes her feelings were slow to catch up. Before she even reached the shower she was already engaged in a fantasy of seizing Zal, leaving town, finding a place outside Otopia, away from Alfheim, far from Demonia's mad cities. It was a bland and impossible dream, safe to indulge because it wouldn't happen.
Lila turned her soaped face up into the streaming water. What did that song Zal wrote years ago say? End of the line and no way out. Run in circles, scream and shout. Other poets had put it better, but none of them had his basslines.
Because she was used to it and didn't know what else to do, she armed herself with her black leathers, boots to vest, and tried not to watch the change. It felt warm and comfortable, nothing more.
Zal was standing in the kitchen, half dancing to the radio and eating from a bowl. Small packets of opened cereal were scattered everywhere around on the worktops, mostly full, showing they had been tried and found wanting.
Sassy was crouched on a high stool at one end of the breakfast bar, a cup of tea in her hands. They made quite an odd sight against the kitchen's clean lines and design. Zal's clothes were still bloodstained and dusty and Sassy looked as though she'd dragged herself out of a dumpster, wadded in several layers of ill-fitting clothes that bore the marks of sleeping rough in the forest. She hunched over her mug as if it was the last tea on earth and gave Lila a cautious once-over, flicking her eyebrow as if she was the one in the odd costume. Lila was pretty used to this, so she ignored it and started peering to see if Zal had left any of his cereal.
“Your habit of mixing everything hasn't been lost then,” she remarked.
“I pride myself that only the worst of me made it through,” he said, moving with faultless rhythm as he sidled out of her way. “Couldn't find the cocaine though. Do they still have cocaine?”
“At the store?” Sassy said with a rising tone at the end that suggested he was being wantonly stupid. “But everyone does Voraxin these days.”
“Is that at the store?” Zal asked between spoonfuls, eyes half closed as he paid most of his attention to the music.
“No,” she sighed and put her head to one side before spelling it out. “It's street only. Why do you think Cedars is so rich? Got their own police force.”
“You're not on it though,” Lila said, finding a box of Rice Pops and starting to hunt down a bowl.
“I'm not stupid,” the girl said with contempt, implying that this was true of only one person in the room.
“No,” Lila agreed, opening drawers. “So why are you here?”
“Like I said, found it,” came the reply. “You want me to go?”
“You said I was in trouble and left it hanging.” She located the spoons after Zal tapped the right place with his hand, still lost in his tunes, only half there.
“You were the one didn't want to talk.”
Lila had to concede that one. “This is all getting off on the wrong foot,” she said, opening a thing she presumed was a refrigerator but seeing only an empty boxlike thing and a control panel beaming full of coloured pictograms instead. “Can we start again?”
She stared at the machine blankly, peering at the images, which seemed to be an entire market's worth of items, some of them flashing, some of them blued out. Zal's hand reached over her shoulder and touched a milk carton, tapped a red circle twice that registered the fat content, and ran his finger up the image of a jug that appeared until it was a quarter full.
“Open the cover,” he said, flicking his thumb in the direction of the box front. She opened it and took out her milk.
When she turned around, Sassy was giving her a long, wide-eyed stare of disbelief.
“I've been away,” Lila said, frowning as she poured.
“She's a bit slow,” Zal added to Sassy as he went back to his position at the sink.
That got the ghost of a smile so Lila didn't say anything for a moment or two. She didn't need to eat the cereal but she wanted to. It tasted better than she expected. As she looked up from her bowl, she saw that Zal was also looking expectantly at Sassy and guessed they'd done some talking the night before.
Sassy made a giving-in face and looked into her tea. “I ran away,” she said. “Like you didn't know that.”
“No record of it,” Lila said.
Sassy narrowed her eyes. “How do you know?”
“I'm the girl who is plugged in,” Lila said. “My job to know.”
“That explains something.” Suddenly she wasn't an awkward teenager confessing something she'd rather not. The confidence of a much older person took command of her, and Lila found herself looking into eyes that were more than capable of dealing with whatever they saw.
“You're a machine. The ones looking for you must be the same. I have trouble hearing them. I thought it was a block but it must just be the speed.”
“I'm easy to find,” Lila said, but as she said it she knew there was one category of people that wouldn't find her easy to locate—machines. Thanks to her rogue-jacking habits, she was sufficiently able to mask herself on the networks and she wasn't plugged in to anything that was capable of hacking her. This meant she was closed to the other cyborgs. The only place she could be aware of them was inside the Signal, and that was too fast and complex even for her to track through it.
Sassy shrugged. “I just know what I hear and see.” She stared into her tea mug, swirling the contents. Her face was tense. Then she sighed and set the mug aside. As she looked up all traces of the teenage attitude were gone. Without it she looked even younger although it had also taken all her vulnerability with it.
Zal lowered his bowl and glanced at Lila.
“It's easier when I pretend,” the girl said. “Sort of. I mean, it's easier for everyone else and it distracts them.” She straightened her back. “It's not an accident that I'm here, you're right. I came before you, to clear the way and make sure the house was safe for the time being. But you got here a bit soon. I'd have been gone myself only you caught me in the act…” She glanced at Zal meaningfully. “I didn't think you'd be so quick or so sharp. When you cornered me, I realised I'd never outrun you and I panicked and did what I do best. Afterwards it seemed like a good idea. I could keep up the old act and watch over you at the same time.”
“Watch over us?” Lila frowned. “Who for?”
“For myself,” the girl said. “You were looking for the one who made you, to whom you were important. You were trying to figure out why anything that has happened to you has happened—was it part of a grand scheme or only a series of incidents without a greater meaning? What you have found seems to point at the mage, Sarasilien, though you wonder if he too is only a lesser player in some even bigger plot, yeah?” She nodded, seeing Lila's silent agreement. “You see, I didn't know this until I got here. I was supposed to find the house and clean it, that's all. But when you got here, I realised who you were.” Her glance included them both. “I couldn't help it. I overheard.”
“You have a bit of a habit there,” Lila murmured although she didn't want to interrupt.
“They're looking for me, and you,” the girl said, without taking visible offence. “You don't have any guard. You know nothing about the spirit plane, or you'd be much more careful. I was doing containment. And anyway, even if you were half a mile away in a lead box, I'd still hear you. I can't not. Another reason I like it here. Quiet. Like I said.”
“Who are they?” Zal asked, placing his bowl quietly down in the sink, his gaze never leaving the girl's face.
“The people who sent me to prep the house or the ones looking out for you now?”
“All of them,” he said.
“The faery Malachi and Temple Greer sent me to do the house. Malachi and me have history in Cedars; he rescued me from some nasty business twenty-two years ago out in Cooper Bay, and we've been trading favours ever since. Greer I don't know personally, though I see you do,” she took in Lila's expression. “He wanted me to check you out, see you were levelling with him.”
“Because now they can't tap me directly for information?”
“I guess. I didn't ask why; that's not how business works for me.”
“And the rest?” Zal asked.
The girl looked suddenly unhappy. “You've been gone fifty years, yeah? Well, a lot changed in that time. A real lot. Not on the surface—people still live in houses, still drive around in cars, still watch screens, play games, eat food, piss each other off like usual, yeah? Sure the fashions and some tech has changed, so it seems, there's a new space program and they're on Mars and they're on the Moon and they're doing this and all that, but on the big scales we haven't come anywhere since before the pyramids, you see what I'm sayin'?”
Lila nodded.
“Well, in the last few generations born since the Moths, there's been a population explosion in people with powers—psychics, seers…you can stick a bundle of names onto all the combinations of psionics out there right now. On the surface, if you're in the big social centres of the world, it looks like everyone's okay with it, yeah? And you haven't had time to get this, but everywhere else it's war by another name, not open war, kinda a cold war, a tepid war that keeps the surface okay, keeps the economy okay, keeps everyone more or less in a home and a job, but there's no real peace for anyone. It's so widespread now they say that the humans will be extinct in another hundred years. The only reason it isn't a slaughter is that everyone has someone close who's a changeling, though ninety percent of them are barely any different. It's not like you can pick them out by race or colour or creed. They come everywhere. But the camel's back broke with the Returners. Like you saw across town, the war's getting open now. Meantime the rogue cyborgs have been dealing in body parts. Their own. Criminal markets are full of upgraders. There are six chop-shops in Cedars will make you over into a machine in two days, for the right price. 'Course they have trouble getting plutonium and such, so they have to use batteries old style, but they aren't so bad these days. And other people have done other things. Your tech is in a lot of gear, Lila. A lot. The chatarazzi call it the Slag Pot—everyone melting down into psionic metal gloop. Some say harmony, but you know people. What do ordinary humans have to offer against those with special abilities, special powers? It's war. Anyway, the rogues were looking for you. Have been ever since Lane found you and lost you again. For all the talk, you're the only one with metal and aether in working order and none of their experiments at fusing those things have worked. Guess they found you.” She gave Lila a curious look.
Lila admitted their execution and assimilation with a nod. “They paid you too?”
She shook her head. “I heard them, that's all.”
“You must have a good memory,” Zal said, wistfully.
“I learned to remember what's important,” she replied. “We don't commit anything to a record. It's unprofessional.”
“We?”
“Readers,” she said and grinned, talking as if what she said was entirely old hat. “Readers don't write stuff down where anyone can see it. Bad for business.”
“You're not just a reader.”
“I am, far as business is concerned,” the girl said firmly and there was a clear note of warning in her voice. “That's all I am.”
“So how did we get to be your business?” Lila asked, leaning on the counter, still trying to figure out how Malachi and Greer had steered her to what she thought was her choice of where to live.
“Because I'm not just a reader,” she said, and then she added awkwardly, “and because nobody ever offered to buy me a pony before, which probably seems like dick to you, but mostly people fear me or want rid of me even when they think I'm only a reader, even when they think I'm only a changeling, or just a street kid.”
She took a deep breath. “I'm not any of those things either, except the street kid part is kind of right. I lost a lot of my abilities a time ago. Deal went bad, I got burned….” She shrugged her tough little shrug. “Since I've been in Cedars, I've been hanging with one of their gangs. Didn't want to. Mostly I had to. They don't let you go easy. Mal got me out. I don't want to go back. They do nasty stuff to people, including their own. I'm sure you don't need a list.”
Lila had been paying attention acutely, but she got no sense that the girl was lying. She glanced at Zal, who seemed more bemused than concerned although he was frowning and his shadow body had extended, diffusing to a fine haze around him. It didn't try to touch the girl, although he easily could have. He looked back at Lila and she was reminded of how much she hated the thought of separating from him again so soon. She turned back.
“I don't like being watched,” Lila said.
“I don't mean any harm,” the girl replied quickly. “Never have.”
“But you're short of a name and a backstory,” Zal said, “and we're too old to fool around.”
“I can't give you my name,” she said equally quickly. “It's too much of a risk.”
“Oh, so we're supposed to trust you with knowing everything about us but you won't extend even half the favour?” Lila shook her head. “I don't think so.”
“You're not the only one who doesn't like being supervised,” came the retort, then, feeling clear anxiety she shook her hands in front of herself to erase the attacking force of her statement—a faery gesture if ever there was one. “Look, the fact is, I already know everything about you whether I like to know it or not. I know a lot about other people too. I can tell you whatever you like, if you just let me stay here. I can hide you from the spirits, if they come here. They'll never see you here as long as I stay.”
Zal folded his arms thoughtfully and lowered his chin. “But the catch is that you're on someone's wanted list.”
Anguished eyes flicked towards him and remained looking at him firmly. “Yes. But we're all on one of those.”
“Might we know who's buying your ticket?” Lila asked.
The girl turned towards her and considered for a moment. “Sarasilien,” she said very quietly. “I saw something, you see, in someone, and he knows I saw it. It must be very important. Those rogues I mentioned looking for you, they were looking for me too. He sent them, through Sandra Lane.”
“The clone, right?”
“Not at the time. It was twenty-two years ago. There were no clones then.”
“How many does she have now?” Lila was really wondering aloud and was surprised when the girl said promptly, “At least three I have seen. There are other cyborgs with clones too, of various kinds. Most of the old ones have at least one. Rogues habitually scatter clones over big areas—across continents. They're the reason I stayed so long in Cedars. There's a lot of old fey there, some demons in the gangmasters. They have enough strength to hold the rogues off. Nobody else does. And they can't do it off their own turf. I managed to get myself disappeared from the networks so they can't track me. It won't be long before they know I've gone though. My gangmaster has no reason to help me once he realises I'm not coming back.”
“Was Malachi the one to get you out of trouble with Sarasilien?”
“Yes,” she nodded solemnly. “It was a big risk for him.”
“Why?”
“Because it interferes in a Long Game. The older forces, the long-lived ones, operate at timescales measured in centuries, perhaps ages. Malachi is the middle kind—centuries, millennia maybe. But these others are older ones. They are fewer. At least, they are now. In the past many more existed, but they got killed as the games went on. Sarasilien is one of the older sort, and what I saw is something concerning a Long Game that he has in progress. He is easily able to kill Malachi if he knew. I am only telling you because I know you don't wish him harm, even though you are angry with him at the moment.”
Lila stared down at the countertop, considering. She looked at the motes of quartz, stuck fast in the resin of the fake stone, at the way their many different angles caught the light, or blocked it. She read between the lines and came up with an answer that surprised her.
“I suppose that locking someone away in Under for a few thousand years might be a move in such a game?” Lila glanced up as she finished, watching the girl's reaction closely. She didn't expect much. She'd already concluded that whoever and whatever the girl was, she was an expert at showing only what she wished someone to see. From the side of her vision, she kept Zal in close check—he had senses that could bypass lying and concealment even better than her ability to read the microresponses in other people's skin that unerringly betrayed the depth of their concern about what they said or did.
“Yes, of course,” the girl said, shrugging it off in a way that neither confirmed nor denied Lila's suspicion about her identity. “Listen, I know that the more I say the less you want to trust me, yeah? And not without reason. I know what happened to you, both of you. But every game has its pieces and you must realise that you are those pieces, as I am. The players are not the gods, cold and on high, as you might imagine. Nor the Fates. They're just ones who live long and have power and like to play.”
Zal's eyes narrowed, and the misty shadow of his aetheric body condensed and withdrew beneath his skin. He was solid as Lila and the girl, and waited for their replies. When they were both silent, Sassy moved uneasily on her barstool and drew her lips into her mouth, biting both of them between her teeth until a white line appeared at their joining.
“I always hated the idea of being a puppet,” he said, with slow and exacting conviction. “But I have been one and it was every bit as awful as I imagined. But in the scheme of the universe, however, it stands, however weak it looks like it might be becoming. I don't buy what you're selling.”
“No. You're a demon. You wouldn't,” she said. “And I am not saying that your every move is pushed by unseen hands from on high. I'm not saying that! I'm saying there are those who like to play and they have liked to play with you. No more. Their age and their powers is all that makes them different. It makes them see things differently. They pick people up, see what happens; they don't take your will, they don't take your life away. They push a little bit here, pull a little bit there, see what happens. They lose some, they win some, they play short, and they play long.”
“They're gamblers,” Lila said, feeling the solid click of pieces falling into place inside her. They made a shape that was certain, a definite form, something she knew all about.
“Yes,” the girl nodded. “That's it.”
“So what's your part?” Zal said, glancing back and forth between her and Lila.
The girl looked each of them in the eye, first Zal, then Lila. “Everyone's got their price.” She waited until both of them nodded to show they understood her, and agreed, in principle. “For some it's money, a little or a lot. For some it's honour, shame, vengeance—all the currencies of pride. You,” she pinned Lila with a direct gaze of impossible clarity, “you played for pride. That's a deadly mortal game. I've never understood why anyone would want it, but that was your game, wasn't it?”
Lila lowered her eyelids, unable to nod but unable to say no. She had thought, early on when Sorcha had showed her the nature of her game with Zal, that it was a love game, perhaps even a sex game. But this girl, whoever she was, had it right. It was a pride game. And so was the one she'd played with her family. “I wouldn't play it that way again.”
“That is why it lost its power. You changed,” the girl said. “Games themselves can change in time, make new rules, lose old ones. Ah, you didn't know that, well, they can. Haven't you ever watched faeries play cards?”
Lila had. It was completely baffling, apparently random. She'd never figured out what was going on or how they knew who had won.
Sassy nodded. “Now your game has become only that—a lovers' game, a toy. If either of you decided to end it now by meeting its victory condition, that would be voluntary, a choice, and so you cannot meet the condition. A condition that can't be met is unplayable, so the rule changes. In this case it has become the spice to a foregone conclusion. It is worn out. You knew this.”
Lila blinked; the girl had put her finger on feelings she hadn't been able to articulate herself. She glanced at Zal and found him looking at her with a glowing warmth she hadn't expected, his eyes amused, his expression a little knowing, a little bit sad. But before she could react the girl was talking again, her intensity begging and getting their attention.
“Zal, you played for your soul time and again. You always bet everything on it, and it always came up. That's a pirate's game, a free man's game, the stakes of angels.”
Zal grinned, and his nostrils flared for a moment as he bowed his head.
“I've been instrumental in all kinds of games,” the girl said, knotting her hands together around her knees, balancing on her narrow bottom on the high chair. Her feet pointed elegantly at the floor as she darted teasing looks at them now. “Win or lose, it was never my hand that mattered, I had nothing to play for, and freedom was impossible. When you've got my gifts, you can't breathe before someone grabs you round the throat. But I've seen a lot, heard a lot.” She let go of her knees and unfolded with grace, sliding off the seat to stand on her feet. On contact with the ground she suddenly gained a strength that both of them could feel as if it were a force pushing at them. Energy surged up through her small frame and gathered in her gaze.
Lila felt her skin suddenly react, surging with a chill over her back. She saw Zal move unconsciously into a defensive stance, poised on the balls of his feet.
The girl nodded in acknowledgement. “You're like me. Sure you played some small-time business for yourselves, but in terms of the Long Game you're in over your heads because you don't see the big picture. Well, I see it—the players, the moves, the stakes, and I'm tired of watching. On my own I've got nothing. I can't get in by myself. But you two—you three, four, five whatever: you've got serious leverage, know what I'm sayin'?”
Lila nodded slowly. She knew that look from her mother's face. “You want in.”
“Damn right!”
“I'm curious,” Zal said, though Lila could tell he was interested just by the way his body was moving. “What's your price?”
“Power,” the girl said simply. “The power to play, that's all.”
“What if we say no?” Lila asked.
The girl looked her in the eye. “Yeah, you could do that. Run away from what you want. People do. But whatever you do, wherever you go, whatever happens, you know the game's on, like it or not, and your only choice is play or be played. Take it to heart or don't give a shit, doesn't matter. You'll live and die, that's for sure, only got a few details to work out here an' there. You keep trying not to play, eventually your offers are gonna dry up. But the thing about being someone else's powerful toy is that you got options. Your position is way better than mine right now, otherwise we wouldn't be talking. Trust me, no options gets old faster than you can believe, makes you ready to slip away, die maybe.”
Lila rubbed her face. “And I thought people just lived the best they could and got on with what they could and suffered with what they couldn't until it was over.”
“Mostly they do, live and die, never played a move, didn't notice or didn't care. Pity them. Or not,” the girl said. “I don't care for all that. I made my move. It's your turn now.”